Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

Forty years after the sky caught fire, the ash still falls.

Your group found an old mine hatch with a ladder going down. Under the ash the ground is warmer, and warm is what keeps you alive. But the deep was never empty, and something down there is climbing toward your light.

Below the Ashes is a 2D survival horror colony game for one to eight players. You control your own survivor while your crew works around you. Dig, build, farm and fight together, and lead your people deeper than anyone should go.

Seven layers reach down 450 meters, from clay and rock to lush hollows, drowned geodes, fossil beds and magma. Ceilings groan and crack before they fall, and a cave in can bury you alive until a friend digs you out. Water floods the low tunnels, lava turns to stone where it meets it, and the air goes stale in places nobody has opened for decades.

Carve rooms into the rock and give them a purpose: bedrooms, a hearth, an infirmary. Farm under grow lamps, run lifts and mine carts down the shafts, and fill the place with furniture, rugs and an old piano. Then keep it standing. Floods soak your stores, wood rots in standing water, and when raiders come the alarm bell calls everyone home to the traps and turrets.

Mark areas to dig, build or guard and your survivors get to work. They have traits, friendships and moods, they grieve the people they lose and they remember how you treat them. In the evening they gather at the fire to sing, play cards and roast whatever you caught. Sometimes a stray cat shows up and decides to stay.

You only see what your lights reach. Every creature down here hunts in its own way. Some follow light, some follow sound, some come up through the floor or wait on the ceiling. Digging, gunshots and even your real voice over the mic can draw them in. The deeper you go, the more of them there are.

Spears, crossbows, shotguns and flamethrowers. At the weapon bench you build your own guns from parts, weld every seam by hand, then paint and name them. A shotgun barrel on a pistol? Sure. Just be ready to clear the jam.

Wounds hit body parts. A hurt leg makes you limp, an open cut in the mud gets infected, and ash fills your lungs if you stay out in a storm too long. Bandage, splint, boil your water and wear a mask. When someone goes down, carry them home before they bleed out.

Rain, snow, blizzards, ash storms and lightning roll over the surface. Tornadoes pick people up and throw them. Fire spreads through wooden rooms, and winter nights bring waves of worms until dawn. Old forests, ruined outskirts, marshes, crags and a burned out crater hide wrecks and buried stations worth the trip.

Other survivors have settled the ruins, each group with its own beliefs about the fire. Haggle at their market stalls: press, flatter or bluff and walk away. Wreck their homes and they come for your stores. Make enough enemies and one of them may offer peace, and then your whole group votes on it.

Play alone, with one friend, or run a colony with up to 8 players over Steam. Proximity voice carries through the tunnels: it echoes in big halls and gets muffled through rock. Tie a rope between you on the way down, craft a walkie talkie when you split up, and carry the friend who can no longer walk.

Play an open sandbox with four difficulty levels from Easy to Extreme, or switch on peaceful mode and just build. A voiced story campaign, where the big decisions go to a group vote, is on its way.

• Single player or online co-op for up to 8 players, with proximity voice

• Seven layers down to 450 m, with cave ins, floods, lava and bad air

• Creatures that hunt by light, by sound and by your real voice

• Build your own guns from parts at the weapon bench

• Body part wounds, infection, sickness, hunger and cold

• Rooms, farms, lifts, mine carts, traps and turrets

• Factions with markets, haggling, raids and peace votes

• Weather, seasons, tornadoes and lightning

• Character looks, photo mode and death replays you can save as a GIF

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The spoken dialogue of the story characters and the trailer narration are generated with an AI text-to-speech model. The lines are written by the developer and generated before release. No real person’s voice was cloned. AI voices can be turned off completely in the settings, in which case all dialogue is shown as text only. I plan to replace them with human voice actors in the future.

AI tools were also used to assist with writing parts of the code.

The in-game art, sound effects and music and other things are not AI generated.